Glass Brain FlyThrough

This is an anatomically-realistic 3D brain visualization depicting real-time source-localized activity (power and "effective" connectivity) from EEG (electroencephalographic) signals. Each color represents source power and connectivity in a different frequency band (theta, alpha, beta, gamma) and the golden lines are white matter anatomical fiber tracts. Estimated information transfer between brain regions is visualized as pulses of light flowing along the fiber tracts connecting the regions.

The modeling pipeline includes MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain scanning to generate a high-resolution 3D model of an individual's brain, skull, and scalp tissue, DTI (Diffusion Tensor Imaging) for reconstructing white matter tracts, and BCILAB (http://sccn.ucsd.edu/wiki/BCILAB) / SIFT (http://sccn.ucsd.edu/wiki/SIFT) to remove artifacts and statistically reconstruct the locations and dynamics (amplitude and multivariate Granger-causal (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/G...) interactions) of multiple sources of activity inside the brain from signals measured at electrodes on the scalp (in this demo, a 64-channel "wet" mobile system by Cognionics/BrainVision (http://www.cognionics.com)).

The final visualization is done in Unity and allows the user to fly around and through the brain with a gamepad while seeing real-time live brain activity from someone wearing an EEG cap.

Team:

- Gazzaley Lab / Neuroscape lab, UCSF: Adam Gazzaley, Roger Anguera, Rajat Jain, David Ziegler, John Fesenko, Morgan Hough

- Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, UCSD: Tim Mullen & Christian Kothe

How We Focus and Concentrate

Scientists at Newcastle University have shed new light on how the brain tunes in to relevant information.

Publishing in Neuron, the team reveal the interplay of brain chemicals which help us pay attention in work funded by the Wellcome Trust and BBSRC.

By changing the way neurons respond to external stimuli we improve our perceptual abilities. While these changes can affect the strength of a neuronal response, they can also affect the fidelity of that response.

Lead author Alex Thiele, Professor of Visual Neuroscience explains: “When you communicate with others, you can make yourself better heard by speaking louder or by speaking more clearly. Neurons appear to do similar things when we’re paying attention. They send their message more intensely to their partners, which compares to speaking louder. But more importantly, they also increase the fidelity of their message, which compares to speaking more clearly.

“Our earlier work has shown that attention is able to affect the intensity of responses – in effect the loudness - by means of the brain chemical acetylcholine. Now we have shown that the fidelity of the response is altered by a different brain chemical system.”

In the paper, the team reveal that the quality of the response is altered by means of glutamate coupling to NMDA receptors (a molecular device that mediates communication between neurons). Carried out in a primate model, these studies for the first time isolate different attention mechanisms at the receptor level.

The research builds on the team’s previous studies and has potentially significant implications not only for our understanding of how our brains work but also give an insight into conditions such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and attention deficit disorder, and may aid in the development of treatments for them.

Source: Newcastle University

This Is How Your Brain Works

Ever wonder how your brain processes information? These brain tricks and illusions help to demonstrate the two main systems of Fast and Slow Thinking in your brain. 

Written and created by Mitchell Moffit 
(twitter @mitchellmoffit) 

and, 

Gregory Brown 
(twitter @whalewatchmeplz).

TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/AsapSCIENCE
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/AsapSCIENCE

Mitchell Moffit
http://www.mitchellmoffit.com
http://www.twitter.com/mitchellmoffit
http://www.facebook.com/mitchellmoffit

Gregory Brown
http://www.gregorybrownart.tumblr.com
http://www.twitter.com/whalewatchmeplz

Further Reading --

1) Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Khaneman
2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11...
3) http://bit.ly/UGmTGY

The Search For Consciousness

By The BBC

Where sits the Consciousness? What is Consciousness? 

Recently it was found out that both hemispheres can be missing yet the children (though severely impaired) are still Conscious! Laughing without a Brain: "Got a Towel?" 

Case studies suggest that some forms of consciousness may not require an intact cerebrum

Humans Not Only Creatures That Think About Thinking

April Flowers reports:

Metacognition, or the ability to think about thinking, is not an ability solely limited to humans according to a new study. Scientists at Georgia State University and the University of Buffalo recently revealed that chimpanzees, humans’ closest relatives, also appear to have the ability.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, is the work of Michael J. Beran and Bonnie M. Perdue of the Georgia State Language Research Center (LRC), and J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo.

“The demonstration of metacognition in nonhuman primates has important implications regarding the emergence of self-reflective mind during humans’ cognitive evolution,” the research team noted.

The scientists at Georgia State’s LRC have trained chimpanzees to use a language-like system of symbols to name things. This gives researchers a novel way to investigate the animals’ states of knowing or not knowing.

For this study, the researchers tested the chimps on a task that required them to use their naming system to identify a food hidden in a location. If, for example, a banana was hidden, the chimpanzees would report that fact by touching the symbol for banana on their symbol keyboard. They would then get the food if they got it right.

The scientists then provided the chimpanzees with either complete or incomplete information about the identity of the food rewards.

Sometimes the animals had already seen the item available in the hidden location. They would immediately name the item by touching the correct symbol without going to look at the item in the hidden location to see what it was.

Other times, the chimps had no information about the hidden food item. This was because they had not seen any food yet on that trial or because even if they had seen a food item, it might not have been the one moved to the hidden location. In these cases, the chimps should have first gone to look in the hidden location before trying to name any food.

The end result was that the chimpanzees named items immediately and directly when they knew what was hidden. However, they sought out more information before naming when they did not already know.

“This pattern of behavior reflects a controlled information-seeking capacity that serves to support intelligent responding, and it strongly suggests that our closest living relative has metacognitive abilities closely related to those of humans,” the authors said.

My Brilliant Brain: Make Me A Genius

Susan Polgar is the world’s first female chess grandmaster. But she wasn’t born with her brilliant brain – it was created by the unique experiment that dominated her childhood. From the age of four her father trained her for up to six hours a day at chess alone.

Growing up in the early 1970s, no woman had ever held the title of chess grandmaster. It was widely believed that female brains weren’t wired with adequate spatial awareness for the game. Nowadays, memory and pattern recognition are recognised as they key areas used by experts in all fields – everyone from waiters to fire-fighters.

Neither of these however, has the trained memory of a chess grandmaster. Able to recreate a chess game glimpsed only on the side of a passing van, Susan’s true genius is revealed when she plays an entire chess match over a mobile phone. Her opponent can see the board but she can’t, instead using her memory to imagine the game.

The Scientific Power Of Thought

Written and created by Mitchell Moffit (twitter @mitchellmoffit) and Gregory Brown (twitter @whalewatchmeplz).

The power of the mind and it's ability to affect physical change may shock you! Find out how simply imagining can make it so. 

Get Your FREE Audio Book - http://bit.ly/10gMVnV

Further Reading:

1) The Brain That Changes Itself - Norman Doidge, M.D.

Music Experiment:

2) http://jn.physiology.org/content/74/3/1037.short
3) http://ti.me/WifVpK

Muscle Experiement:

4) http://jn.physiology.org/content/67/5/1114.short

Brain Plasticity:

5) http://bit.ly/S8CHlM

How The Human Brain Adapts To Injury

This image shows four sources of evidence of takeover by a right-hemisphere area following the disablement of its left hemisphere counterpart. Credit: Carnegie Mellon University

For the first time, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) have used a new combination of neural imaging methods to discover exactly how the human brain adapts to injury. The research, published in Cerebral Cortex, shows that when one brain area loses functionality, a "back-up" team of secondary brain areas immediately activates, replacing not only the unavailable area but also its confederates.
"The human brain has a remarkable ability to adapt to various types of trauma, such as traumatic brain injury and stroke, making it possible for people to continue functioning after key brain areas have been damaged," said Marcel Just, the D. O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at CMU and CCBI director. "It is now clear how the brain can naturally rebound from injuries and gives us indications of how individuals can train their brains to be prepared for easier recovery. The secret is to develop alternative thinking styles, the way a switch-hitter develops alternative batting styles. Then, if a muscle in one arm is injured, they can use the batting style that relies more on the uninjured arm." 

For the study, Just, Robert Mason, senior research psychologist at CMU, and Chantel Prat, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study precisely how the brains of 16 healthy adults adapted to the temporary incapacitation of the Wernicke area, the brain's key region involved in language comprehension. They applied Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) in the middle of the fMRI scan to temporarily disable the Wernicke area in the participants' brains. The participants, while in the MRI scanner, were performing a sentence comprehension task before, during and after the TMS was applied. Normally, the Wernickearea is a major player in sentence comprehension. 

The research team used the fMRI scans to measure how the brain activity changed immediately following stimulation to the Wernicke area. The results showed that as the brain function in the Wernicke area decreased following the application of TMS, a "back-up" team of secondary brain areas immediately became activated and coordinated, allowing the individual's thought process to continue with no decrease in comprehension performance. 

The brain's back-up team consisted of three types of brain regions: (1) contralateral areas—areas that are in the mirror-image location of the brain; (2) areas that are right next to the impaired area; and (3) a frontal executive area. 

"The first two types of back-up areas have similar brain capabilities as the impaired Wernicke area, although they are less efficient at the capability," Just said. "The third area plays a strategic role as in responding to the initial impairment and recruiting back-up areas with similar capabilities." 

Additionally, the research showed that impairing the Wernicke area also negatively affected the cortical partners with which the Wernicke area had been working. "Thinking is a network function," Just explained. "When a key node of a network is impaired, the network that is closely collaborating with the impaired node is also impaired. People do their thinking with groups of brain areas, not with single brain areas." 

Mason, the study's lead author, noted that following the TMS, the impaired area and its partners gradually returned to their previous levels of coordinated activity, while the back-up team of brain areas was still in place. "This means, that for some period of time, there were two cortical teams operating simultaneously, explaining why performance is sometimes improved by TMS," he said. 

This research builds on Just's previous research on brain resilience after stroke and brain training to remediate dyslexia. The studies are motivated by a computational theory, called 4CAPS, that provides an account of how autonomous brain systems dynamically self-organize themselves in response to changing circumstances, which the researchers believe to be the basis of fluid intelligence. 

Just, who uses brain imaging to understand how brain processes underpin various types of human thought, has helped to establish Carnegie Mellon as a world leader in brain sciences. The university recently launched a Brain, Mind and Learning initiative to build from its research excellence in psychology, computer science and computation to continue to solve real-world problems.

Via: "Medical Xpress"

How The Brain Adapts When Goals Shift

Scientists have identified mechanisms that govern how the brain incorporates information about new situations into our existing goals, according to research recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using brain scans of human volunteers, researchers found that updating goals takes place in a region known as the prefrontal cortex, and appears to involve signals associated with the brain chemical dopamine.

When the researchers used a magnetic pulse to interrupt activity in that region of the brain, the volunteers were unable to switch to a new task when playing a game requiring them to push a button after seeing letters pop up on a screen.

“We have found a fundamental mechanism that contributes to the brain’s ability to concentrate on one task and then flexibly switch to another task,” says Jonathan Cohen, professor in neuroscience at Princeton University and co-director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. “Impairments in this system are central to many critical disorders of cognitive function such as those observed in schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

Existing research has shown that when new information is used to update a task, behavior, or goal, this information is held in a type of short-term memory storage known as working memory. Investigators did not know, however, what mechanisms were involved in updating this information.

To find out, Cohen’s team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of human volunteers playing a game where they pressed a specific button depending on a particular visual cue.

If the volunteer saw the letter A prior to seeing the letter X, he or she had to press button 1. But if the volunteer saw the letter B prior to seeing the X, the participant had to press button 2. The A and B served as the new information that the participant used to update their goal of deciding which button to press. Another version of the task required the same participants to press button 1 upon seeing an X regardless of whether an A or B was shown.

With the fMRI, researchers detected activity in the right prefrontal cortex during tasks that required the participants to remember whether they saw an A or a B before pressing the correct button, but not during tasks where the participant only had to press the button when prompted by an X.

These results confirmed findings from a previous study led by Cohen and published in the journal Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience in 2010 that used another scanning method to gauge the timing of the brain activity. Using electroencephalography (EEG), the researchers found that the prefrontal cortex showed a spike in brain electrical activity 150 milliseconds after the participant viewed the context letter A or B.

For the current study, the researchers demonstrated that the prefrontal cortex is indeed the area of the brain involved with updating working memory by sending a short magnetic pulse to the region. This pulse disrupted cortex activity at the precise time—as revealed by the EEG—the researchers suspected that the prefrontal cortex was updating working memory.

When the researchers introduced the pulse to the right side of prefrontal cortex about 150 milliseconds after the volunteers saw the A or B, the participants were unable to press the correct buttons, Cohen says.

“We predicted that if the pulse was delivered to the part of the right prefrontal cortex observed using fMRI, and at the time when the brain is updating its information as revealed by EEG, then the subject would not retain the information about A and B, interfering with his or her performance on the button-pushing task,” Cohen says.

Finally, the researchers explored their theory that dopamine—a naturally occurring chemical involved in motivation and reward among other brain functions—tags new information entering the prefrontal cortex as important for updating working memory and goals.

Cohen and his team imaged a brain region called the midbrain, which contains clusters of nerve cells called dopaminergic nuclei that are the source of most of the dopamine signals in the brain. Using high-resolution fMRI, the researchers probed the activity of these dopamine-releasing cells in the brains of volunteers engaged in the game described above.

The researchers found that the brain activity in these areas correlated both with the activity in the right prefrontal cortex and with the ability of the volunteers to press the correct buttons.

“The remarkable part was that the dopamine signals correlated both with the behavior of our volunteers and their brain activity in the prefrontal cortex,” Cohen says. “This constellation of findings provides strong evidence that the dopaminergic nuclei are enabling the prefrontal cortex to hold on to information that is relevant for updating behavior, but not information that isn’t.”

David Badre, a Brown University assistant professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences, says the work is an important step forward in understanding how working memory is updated. Badre is familiar with the work but had no role in it.

In a commentary published online November 9 by PNAS, Badre wrote: “The mechanisms by which the brain achieves an adaptive balance between flexibility and stability remain the basis of much current investigation in cognitive neuroscience. These results provide a basis for new investigations into the neural mechanisms of flexible, goal-directed behavior.”

The research was supported by the Regina and John Scully Center for the Neuroscience of the Mind and Behavior, the National Institutes of Health, Princeton University’s R.W. Crecca ’46 Senior Thesis Research Fund for Molecular Biology, and the Kane Family Foundation.

Researchers from Virginia Tech, Harvard Medical School, Tulane University School of Medicine, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Neuroscience Cognitive Control Laboratory at PNI contributed to the study.

Via: "Futurity"

Source: Princeton University

Children’s Cells Living In Mothers’ Brains

The Connection Between Mother and Child Is Ever Deeper Than Thought

Robert Martone reports,

The profound psychological and physical bonds shared by the mother and her child begin during gestation when the mother is everything for the developing fetus, supplying warmth and sustenance, while her heartbeat provides a soothing constant rhythm.

The physical connection between mother and fetus is provided by the placenta, an organ, built of cells from both the mother and fetus, which serves as a conduit for the exchange of nutrients, gasses, and wastes. Cells may migrate through the placenta between the mother and the fetus, taking up residence in many organs of the body including the lung, thyroid muscle, liver, heart, kidney and skin. These may have a broad range of impacts, from tissue repair and cancer prevention to sparking immune disorders.

... stunning results from a new study show that cells from other individuals are also found in the brain. In this study, male cells were found in the brains of women and had been living there, in some cases, for several decades. What impact they may have had is now only a guess, but this study revealed that these cells were less common in the brains of women who had Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting they may be related to the health of the brain.

... although we certainly consider our actions and decisions as originating in the activity of our own individual brains, cells from other individuals are living and functioning in that complex structure. However, the mixing of cells from genetically distinct individuals is not at all uncommon. This condition is called chimerism after the fire-breathing Chimera from Greek mythology, a creature that was part serpent part lion and part goat. Naturally occurring chimeras are far less ominous though, and include such creatures as the slime mold and corals.

 Microchimerism is the persistent presence of a few genetically distinct cells in an organism. This was first noticed in humans many years ago when cells containing the male “Y” chromosome were found circulating in the blood of women after pregnancy. Since these cells are genetically male, they could not have been the women’s own, but most likely came from their babies during gestation.

In this new study, scientists observed that microchimeric cells are not only found circulating in the blood, they are also embedded in the brain. They examined the brains of deceased women for the presence of cells containing the male “Y” chromosome. They found such cells in more than 60 percent of the brains and in multiple brain regions. Since Alzheimer’s disease is more common in women who have had multiple pregnancies, they suspected that the number of fetal cells would be greater in women with AD compared to those who had no evidence for neurological disease. The results were precisely the opposite: there were fewer fetal-derived cells in women with Alzheimer’s. The reasons are unclear.

Microchimerism most commonly results from the exchange of cells across the placenta during pregnancy, however there is also evidence that cells may be transferred from mother to infant through nursing. 

In addition to exchange between mother and fetus, there may be exchange of cells between twins in utero, and there is also the possibility that cells from an older sibling residing in the mother may find their way back across the placenta to a younger sibling during the latter’s gestation. Women may have microchimeric cells both from their mother as well as from their own pregnancies, and there is even evidence for competition between cells from grandmother and infant within the mother.

What it is that fetal microchimeric cells do in the mother’s body is unclear, although there are some intriguing possibilities. For example, fetal microchimeric cells are similar to stem cells in that they are able to become a variety of different tissues and may aid in tissue repair. 

One research group investigating this possibility followed the activity of fetal microchimeric cells in a mother rat after the maternal heart was injured: they discovered that the fetal cells migrated to the maternal heart and differentiated into heart cells helping to repair the damage. In animal studies, microchimeric cells were found in maternal brains where they became nerve cells, suggesting they might be functionally integrated in the brain. It is possible that the same may true of such cells in the human brain.

These microchimeric cells may also influence the immune system. A fetal microchimeric cell from a pregnancy is recognized by the mother’s immune system partly as belonging to the mother, since the fetus is genetically half identical to the mother, but partly foreign, due to the father’s genetic contribution. This may “prime” the immune system to be alert for cells that are similar to the self, but with some genetic differences. Cancer cells which arise due to genetic mutations are just such cells, and there are studies which suggest that microchimeric cells may stimulate the immune system to stem the growth of tumors. Many more microchimeric cells are found in the blood of healthy women compared to those with breast cancer, for example, suggesting that microchimeric cells can somehow prevent tumor formation. In other circumstances, the immune system turns against the self, causing significant damage. Microchimerism is more common in patients suffering from Multiple Sclerosis than in their healthy siblings, suggesting chimeric cells may have a detrimental role in this disease, perhaps by setting off an autoimmune attack.

Via: "Scientific American"

Uploading A Honey Bee’s Brain Into A Flying InsectoBot

By George Dvorsky,

A new project has been announced in which scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are hoping to create the first accurate computer simulation of a honey bee brain — and then upload it into an autonomous flying robot.

This is obviously a huge win for science — but it could also save the world. The researchers hope a robotic insect could supplement or replace the shrinking population of honey bees that pollinate essential plant life.

Called the "Green Brain Project," it was recently given £1 million (USD $1,614,700) by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), as well as hardware donations from the NVIDIA corporation.

Specifically, NVIDIA will provide them with high-performance graphical processing units called GPU accelerators. This will allow the researchers to simulate aspects of a honey bee's brain by using massively paralleled desktop PCs. 

And indeed, the researchers are going to need all the computational power they can get; it may appear that insects have simple minds — but their brains can be extremely complex.

Now, it should be noted that the researchers aren't trying to emulate a complete honey bee brain, but rather two specific and complex functions within it, namely vision and sense of smell. Once complete, they will upload those models into a robotic honey bee so that it can act autonomously.

Full size

"This is an important further advance over current work on brain models because it is becoming more and more clear that an essential aspect of brain function is that the brain is not acting in isolation but in constant interaction with the body and the environment," they note in their proposal, "This concept of 'embodiment' and its consequences for cognition are important insights of modern cognitive science and will become equally important for modern neuroscience."

By isolating and modeling these particular functions, the researchers hope to provide their flying robot with the cognitive power required to perform basic tasks — and without a set of pre-programmed instructions. It is hoped, for example, that the robotic bee will be able to detect particular odors or gasses in the same way that real bee can identify certain flowers.

To help them with their work, the researchers will collaborate with Martin Giurfa of Toulouse, an expert in all aspects of bee brain anatomy, physiology, and bee cognition and behavior.

Should they be successful, it would mark an important moment in technological history: The first robot brain that can perform complex tasks as proficiently as the animal its trying to emulate.

The Green Brain Project could further our understanding of both artificial intelligence and the neuroscientific underpinnings of animal cognition. But also, along with the National Science Foundation-funded Robobees project (led by Harvard University), the advent of an artificial pollinator could provide a solution (either temporarily or permanently) to the problem of dwindling honey bee populations — an organism that's currently dealing with the devastating effects of colony collapse disorder.

In fact, the artificial honey bee may be the first of many robots we introduce into the environment to make up for the current era of widespread extinctions.

Via: "IO9"

Hacking The Brain: The Next Domain Of Warfare

It’s been fashionable in military circles to talk about cyberspace as a “fifth domain” for warfare, along with land, space, air and sea. But there’s a sixth and arguably more important warfighting domain emerging: the human brain.

This new battlespace is not just about influencing hearts and minds with people seeking information. It’s about involuntarily penetrating, shaping, and coercing the mind in the ultimate realization of Clausewitz’s definition of war: compelling an adversary to submit to one’s will. And the most powerful tool in this war is brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, which connect the human brain to devices.

Current BCI work ranges from researchers compiling and interfacing neural data such as in the Human Conectome Project to work by scientists hardening the human brain against rubber hose cryptanalysis to technologists connecting the brain to robotic systems. While these groups are streamlining the BCI for either security or humanitarian purposes, the reality is that misapplication of such research and technology has significant implications for the future of warfare.

Where BCIs can provide opportunities for injured or disabled soldiers to remain on active duty post-injury, enable paralyzed individuals to use their brain to type, or allow amputees to feel usingbionic limbs, they can also be exploited if hacked. BCIs can be used to manipulate … or kill.

Recently, security expert Barnaby Jack demonstrated the vulnerability of biotechnological systems by highlighting how easilypacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) could be hacked, raising fears about the susceptibility of even life-saving biotechnological implants. This vulnerability could easily be extended to biotechnologies that connect directly to the brain, such as vagus nerve stimulation or deep-brain stimulation.

Outside the body, recent experiments have proven that the brain can control and maneuverquadcopter drones and metal exoskeletons. How long before we harness the power of mind-controlled weaponized drones – or use BCIs to enhance the power, efficiency, and sheer lethality of our soldiers?

This new battlespace is not just about influencing hearts and minds. It’s about involuntarily penetrating and coercing the mind.

Given that military research arms such as the United States’ DARPA are investing in understanding complex neural processesand enhanced threat detection through BCI scan for P300responses, it seems the marriage between neuroscience and military systems will fundamentally alter the future of conflict.

And it is here that military researchers need to harden the systems that enable military application of BCIs. We need to prevent BCIs from being disrupted or manipulated, and safeguard against the ability of the enemy to hack an individual’s brain.

The possibilities for damage, destruction, and chaos are very real. This could include manipulating a soldier’s BCI during conflict so that s/he were forced to pull the gun trigger on friendlies, install malicious code in his own secure computer system, call in inaccurate coordinates for an air strike, or divulge state secrets to the enemy seemingly voluntarily. Whether an insider has fallen victim to BCI hacking and exploits a system from within, or an external threat is compelled to initiate a physical attack on hard and soft targets, the results would present major complications: in attribution, effectiveness of kinetic operations, and stability of geopolitical relations.

Like every other domain of warfare, the mind as the sixth domain is neither isolated nor removed from other domains; coordinated attacks across all domains will continue to be the norm. It’s just that military and defense thinkers now need to account for the subtleties of the human mind … and our increasing reliance upon the brain-computer interface.

Regardless of how it will look, though, the threat is real and not as far away as we would like – especially now that researchers just discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the brain.

Via: "Wired"

Brain Power: From Neurons To Networks

Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks is a 10-minute film and an accompanying  TED Book. Based on new research on how to best nurture children’s brains from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child and University of Washington’s I-LABS, the film explores the parallels between a child’s brain development and the development of the global brain of Internet, offering insights into the best ways to shape both. The film and TEDBook launched at the California Academy of Sciences on November 8, 2012.

The Let it Ripple series is all about collaborating and giving back. 

Directed by @tiffanyshlain Please share this film far and wide! Suggested ways below. Check out the #TEDBook that accompanies this film. Info at:http://www.letitripple.org

Special thanks to Tim Delaughter, Dominic Griffin and The Polyphonic Spree for donating their song "It's the Sun" and to Moby for donating his song "Wait for Me."

**All music rights secured for "It's the Sun" by Tim Delaughter and Dominic Griffin.** 

**All music rights secured for "Wait for Me" by Moby.** 

Hacking The Brain and Successfully Extracting Sensitive Data

With a chilling hint of the not-so-distant future, researchers at the Usenix Security conference have demonstrated a zero-day vulnerabilityin your brain. Using a commercial off-the-shelf brain-computer interface, the researchers have shown that it’s possible to hack your brain, forcing you to reveal information that you’d rather keep secret.

As we’ve covered in the past, a brain-computer interface is a two-part device: There’s the hardware — which is usually a headset (an EEG; an electroencephalograph) with sensors that rest on your scalp — and software, which processes your brain activity and tries to work out what you’re trying to do (turn left, double click, open box, etc.) BCIs are generally used in a medical setting with very expensive equipment, but in the last few years cheaper, commercial offerings have emerged. For $200-300, you can buy an Emotiv (pictured above) or Neurosky BCI, go through a short training process, and begin mind controlling your computer.

Both of these commercial BCIs have an API — an interface that allows developers to use the BCI’s output in their own programs. In this case, the security researchers — from the Universities of Oxford and Geneva, and the University of California, Berkeley — created a custom program that was specially designed with the sole purpose of finding out sensitive data, such as the location of your home, your debit card PIN, which bank you use, and your date of birth. The researchers tried out their program on 28 participants (who were cooperative and didn’t know that they were being brain-hacked), and in general the experiments had a 10 to 40% chance of success of obtaining useful information (pictured above).

To extract this information, the researchers rely on what’s known as the P300 response — a very specific brainwave pattern (pictured right) that occurs when you recognize something that is meaningful (a person’s face), or when you recognize something that fits your current task (a hammer in the shed). The researchers basically designed a program that flashes up pictures of maps, banks, and card PINs, and makes a note every time your brain experiences a P300. Afterwards, it’s easy to pore through the data and work out — with fairly good accuracy — where a person banks, where they live, and so on.

In a real-world scenario, the researchers foresee a game that is specially tailored by hackers to extract sensitive information from your brain — or perhaps an attack vector that also uses social engineering to lull you into a false sense of security. It’s harder to extract data from someone who knows they’re being attacked — as interrogators and torturers well know.

Moving forward, this brain hack can only improve in efficacy as BCIs become cheaper, more accurate, and thus more extensively used. Really, your only defense is to not think about the topic — but if you’re proactively on the defensive, then the hacker has already messed up. The only viable solution that I can think of is to ensure that you don’t use your brain-computer interface with shady software,brain malware — but then again, in a science-fictional future, isn’t it almost guaranteed that the government would mandate the inclusion of brain-hacking software in the operating system itself?

Via: "Extreme Tech"

The Architecture Of Memory

Most of us think of memory as a chamber of the mind, and assume that our capacity to remember is only as good as our brain. But according to some architectural theorists, our memories are products of our body’s experience of physical space. Or, to consolidate the theorem: Our memories are only as good as our buildings.

In the BBC television series “Sherlock,” the famous detective’s capacious memory is portrayed through the concept of the “mind palace“—what is thought to be a sort of physical location in the brain where a person stores memories like objects in a room. Describing this in the book A Study in Scarlet, Holmes says, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose…”

The mind palace—also known as the memory palace or method of loci—is a mnemonic device thought to have originated in ancient Rome, wherein items that need to be memorized are pinned to some kind of visual cue and strung together into a situated narrative, a journey through a space. The science writer and author Joshua Foer covered this technique in depth in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, in which he trained for and ultimately won the U.S. Memory Championship. To memorize long lists of words, a deck of cards, a poem, or a set of faces, mental athletes, as they’re called, fuse a familiar place—say, the house they grew up in—with a self-created fictional environment populated by the objects in their list. In an excerpt from his book published in the New York Times, Foer describes his own palace construction:

I was storing the images in the memory palace I knew better than any other, one based on the house in Washington in which I grew up. Inside the front door, the Incredible Hulk rode a stationary bike while a pair of oversize, loopy earrings weighed down his earlobes (three of clubs, seven of diamonds, jack of spades). Next to the mirror at the bottom of the stairs, Terry Bradshaw balanced on a wheelchair (seven of hearts, nine of diamonds, eight of hearts), and just behind him, a midget jockey in a sombrero parachuted from an airplane with an umbrella (seven of spades, eight of diamonds, four of clubs). I saw Jerry Seinfeld sprawled out bleeding on the hood of a Lamborghini in the hallway (five of hearts, ace of diamonds, jack of hearts), and at the foot of my parents’ bedroom door, I saw myself moonwalking with Einstein (four of spades, king of hearts, three of diamonds).

According to Foer, in order for this technique to work, the features of the memory palace must be hyperreal, exaggerating the edges of normalcy in order to stand out in the mind. Whether the palace is a modernist bungalow or a faux-Italianate McMansion or a mobile home doesn’t matter, so long as it is memorable, which is to say, so long as it is a place.

The philosopher Edward S. Casey defines a “place”—as distinct from a “site”—as a physical location where memories can be contained and preserved. An empty lot, for example, would be considered a site—a generic, boundless locale which “possesses no points of attachment onto which to hang our memories, much less retrieve them.” By contrast, a place is “full of protuberant features and forceful vectors—and distinct externally from other places…We observe this when an indifferent building lot, easily confused with other empty lots, is transformed into a memorable place by the erection of a distinctive house upon it.”

From an architect’s perspective, the transformation of a site (or you could call it a space) into a place is a two-way process. Erecting a structure enables the space to contain memories, and the installation of memories turns that structure into a place. In his essay in the book Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, UC Berkeley architecture professor Donlyn Lyndon explains, ”‘Place,’ as I understand it, refers to spaces that can be remembered, that we can imagine, hold in the mind, and consider.”

Lyndon argues that “Good places are structured so that they attract and hold memories; they are sticky—or perhaps you would rather say magnetic.” He suggests that buildings which try too hard to control the experience of the user ultimately fail to become true places. “Seeking to make each place a singular, memorable work of art often makes the insistence of its vocabulary resistant to the attachment of memories—to the full engagement of the people who use and live with the building.”

This is perhaps why, when building a mind palace, we are told to enhance and distort the standard features of our design. As we add character and color, our own emotions and reactions become the plaster between the walls of our palace and the hooks on which we hang the ace of hearts or the Prince of Wales or the breakfast cereal. Just as we usually think of memory as the property of the head, we often place emotion in the heart and reaction in the gut, and suddenly through this process, the whole physical body becomes integrated into memorization.

In another essay in Spatial Recall, Finnish architecture professor Juhani Pallasmaa asserts, “Human memory is embodied, skeletal and muscular in its essence, not merely cerebral,” later punctuating his point with a quote from Casey, the philosopher: “[B]ody memory is…the natural center of any sensitive account of remembering.”

In other words, while the mind palace technique may seem charmingly counterintuitive to the average rememberer of grocery lists, it is probably the most innate method of recall we have, if we learn how to use it. Which is, of course, why Sherlock Holmes was able to mentally reconstruct crimes in order to solve mysteries, and why Joshua Foer had a relatively short road to becoming a national memory champion.

Via: "Smithsonian Mag"